The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.
The disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia...
The diagnosis of these errors follows a common pattern. Each attempt by pure reason to establish the metaphysical doctrines towards which it is impelled transgresses the limits of experience, applying...
The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an arden...
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. ‘Kitsch,’ he wrote, ‘causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The s...
That, in my view, is the truth in socialism, the truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice...
Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to liv...
Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympa...
Observing the volatile nature of the new democracies, I came vividly to see how unimportant a part of democracy are elections, in comparison with the enduring institutions and public spirit that make...
Many people under the influence of science, and particularly neuro-nonsense, will say the sacred is an old concept, it’s just a hangover, but you can easily see that’s not so, because everyone has a s...
Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights.
In the face of sorrow, imperfection and the fleetingness of our affections and joys, we ask ourselves ‘why?’. We need reassurance. We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful an...
In general we should be aware of, and protective towards, those precious legal instruments that we already possess, and which often depend on principles of equity and natural law and not on top-down l...
In The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy...
I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied on some dark official business, and in which party slogans and symbols disfi...
England for him was no longer a real place, but a consecrated isle in the lake of forgetting, where the God of the English still strode through an imaginary Eden, admiring His works.
Beauty is not the source of disinterested pleasure, but simply the object of a universal interest: the interest that we have in beauty, and in the pleasure that beauty brings.
We find the university dominated by theology of another kind – a godless theology, to be sure, but one no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less ardent in its pursuit of...
Union’, you at the same time license the would-be leaders. You give credentials to those who promise to guide society along its allotted path, and you confer on them the authority to conscript, dictat...
Nacionalismo, como uma ideologia, é perigoso apenas à medida que as ideologias são perigosas. Ocupa o espaço deixado vago pela religião e, ao fazê-lo, estimula o verdadeiro crente a venerar a ideia na...